Elon Musk Just Doesn’t Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks

In June of 2018, before he declared himself “Dark MAGA” and before he wore a hat with the inscription “Trump Was Right About Everything,” Elon Musk took to a social media platform he did not yet own to describe his own politics. “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks,” Musk wrote on the site then known as Twitter, prompting The Guardian’s Stuart Kelly to wryly ask, “[H]as Musk actually read any of Banks’s books?”

Besides the approving nods on social media, Musk has named several SpaceX craft in homage to sentient vessels in Banks’s Culture cycle of novels and stories. But even if Musk has read Banks’s books, it’s less than clear if he’s taken the right lessons from them. There’s a lot that’s been written in the last decade about what the writer Emily Nussbaum called “bad fans”—a brigade that also includes a certain head of state to whom Musk has grown close in the last year. And when it comes to Musk and Banks, the former being a bad fan of the latter is arguably the best case scenario.

Banks, who died in 2013 at the age of 59, wrote in a wide range of styles; The Crow Road is a moving coming-of-age story, while the Gothic-infused The Wasp Factory features a scene so horrific I nearly threw the book across the room the first time I read it. He was also held deeply political convictions; his nonfiction book Raw Spirit begins with Banks destroying his passport to protest the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It’s the Culture series for which Banks is best known, however; a group of novels and stories set across the galaxy. There is no overarching story here; a handful of characters turn up in multiple works, but the books themselves stand alone. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle is a good comparison, both in terms of the granular level of storytelling and for the way you can see an author using science fiction to grapple with big sociopolitical ideas. Or, as the narration in 1987’s Consider Phlebas phrases it, the Culture is a “seemingly disunited, anarchic, hedonistic, decadent mélange of more or less human species.”

The Culture books vary wildly in tone and structure. Use of Weapons is a kind of espionage thriller surrounding a formally inventive series of flashbacks that concludes with an utterly harrowing moment that spins the whole narrative around; The Hydrogen Sonata and The Player of Games focus on solitary characters pursuing their own aesthetic or artistic ambitions. Surface Detail is both a thrilling space opera and a study of metaphysics; Consider Phlebas and Matter both get plenty of mileage by showing readers the Culture from the perspective of someone raised outside of that society. It’s a lot; it also accomplishes the difficult task of abounding with big ideas even as it’s also gripping on the sentence-to-sentence level. It’s not for nothing that Banks was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1993, after all.

Before going deeper into Banks’s Culture books, it seems worthwhile to address one point: I don’t mean to argue that Musk’s fondness for Banks is flawed along partisan or ideological lines. I myself have read and enjoyed the work of plenty of authors with whom I disagree politically. Musk’s fondness for Banks’s work feels more dissonant than that. It’s as though he grew so attached to the idea of a utopian spacefaring civilization that he never bothered to look too deeply into the inner workings of that civilization.

Let’s get the biggest one out of the way: the Culture is a society where a significant number of its inhabitants are genderfluid. Here’s a description of one of the characters in 2008’s Matter:

Jerle Batra had been born male. He had, as was common in the Culture, changed sex a while, and had borne a child.

Elsewhere in the novel, its narrator makes the argument that there’s a very good reason for this practice:

She kept a couple of intermittent, unbothered lovers even as she changed, then, as a man, took many more, mostly female. It was true: one made a better, more considerate lover when one had been as one’s partner.

This aspect of the Culture is not limited to Matter; the practice of changing one’s gender while in a relationship is something that comes up in Excession, to memorable effect. Given Musk’s reactionary shift on matters of gender, it’s unclear what he makes of this. Again, this is not simply a background element; significant characters throughout the Culture books are described as having experienced this, and for it to have been no big deal.

There’s also the matter of currency and private property. The Culture, as a society, has little use for either. In Excession, Banks writes that “[p]ractically the only form of private property the Culture recognised was thought, and memory.” The short story “A Gift From the Culture,” meanwhile, puts it especially succinctly:

Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again, especially when I’m being tempted to do something I know I shouldn’t, and there’s money involved (when is there not?).

It’s also notable that one of the antagonists in 2010’s Surface Detail is an absurdly wealthy member of a non-Culture society named Joiler Veppers. Banks will often write his antagonists with empathy; even when he depicts characters who have done atrocious things, he often probes deeply into their minds and reminds the readers of these characters’ fundamental humanity. Veppers, however, is primarily on the page to be awful. A rapist, torturer, and enslaver, he is less a three-dimensional character and more of an illustration of the corrupting influences of money and power.

Read enough of the Culture cycle and something else will come up: though most of the primary characters in the Culture are human, our own planet is not part of the Culture—though it does exist. The novella The State of the Art features a group of Culture agents visiting late-20th century Earth for a time. It’s one of a handful of Culture works to feature recurring characters, and in Use of Weapons, one character from the Culture muses on capital punishment.

I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair. Not torture—that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the par when it came to getting people helpless and confined, to inflict pain upon them—but actually set it up to kill them when they sat. They—get this—they either gassed them or they passed a very high electric currents through them.

It’s in the role of machine intelligences in Culture society that one can see what might be the biggest appeal of these books. Consider Phlebas’s narrator observes that “the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had.” It’s not too hard to go from that to Musk’s statement on social media from early April that “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” And, to be fair, the machine intelligences in the Culture novels do get a lot of the best lines throughout the series.

Examined in most lights, Musk’s fondness for Iain M. Banks’s work often feels paradoxical. Then again, it isn’t the only case where his declarations have a puzzling quality to them. In 2018, he made the following declaration of his own politics:

By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.

It isn’t hard to see a connection here between this mindset and the idea of effective altruism, which Musk has also espoused. Whether or not effective altruism is a kind of socialism is a matter I will leave to other writers—though it’s far from a settled matter. What’s a lot more frustrating is trying to map the futuristic society Iain M. Banks described in his fiction onto Elon Musk’s foray in politics—especially in the last five years. Alternately, if Musk’s long-term goal is something like the Culture, he’s made some odd choices as far as getting there is concerned.